Wednesday, November 14, 2007

...and this emphatically does NOT make me giggle.

The saga of one Claudia Contrada, a 17 year old who is not gay, no matter how much she insists otherwise. How do we know? Well, her mother says so. She's kind of invested in -not- having a lesbian for a child, you see: she co-runs a virulently anti-gay activist organization. One that in fact was busy protesting the very play her daughter was an actor in--"The Laramie Project," natch, it's such an offensive piece--amd which inspired her to come out, just a couple of weeks ago.

This week Contrada's daughter Claudia is starring in the Acton High School Production of the Laramie Project despite the fact that her mother helped to organize a forum against it, and no doubt opened the door for the similarly anti-gay Fred Phelps crew to plan their own protest of the event.

In a most brilliant display of resilience Claudia is standing up as an inspiring role model for anyone, especially young people, struggling with homophobia in their homes or communities. In addition to her acting, some of the things Claudia speaks out about include animal rights, AIDS, and war.

Today in an exclusive interview with QueerToday.com Claudia has revealed that she is a lesbian...

...7. What inspired you to become interested in the rights of oppressed communities, and animal rights, etc.? Who are some leaders (alive or dead) you look up to ?

Well I love animals and have grown up with them so the thought of killing them or torturing them tears me up. It’s disgusting. As far as oppressed communities go, I know what it’s like to be prevented from being who you are. It’s painful and psychologically unhealthy. People shouldn’t have to go through that.

8. Do you identify as LGB or T?

I am a lesbian, which my mom still does not get. She just says that I am confused. I realized in around eighth grade, but I was in denial for quite some time because I was scared due to my mother constantly saying that homosexuality is wrong. How can it ever be wrong to love though? That’s what I’d like to know.

The story spread among LGBT and progressive blogs. And on November 2nd, Claudia went on to give a stellar performance in the sold-out Laramie Project play that depicts the brutal anti-gay murder of Mathew Shepard. Despite overwhelming support from the community, the play was protested by Fred Phelps thanks to the red carpet Claudia's mom rolled out for them by holding an anti-Laramie Project forum at the school a few weeks prior.

That should have been the end of this story.

But today things suddenly took a turn for the worse. The author of the MassResistance website*, longtime anti-gay activist Brian Camenker, announced that Amy Contrada had pulled her daughter from school and the remaining performances of the play. As usual, his expose' also included lies and attacks on me, QueerToday.com, and the Acton school system. The twisted material was also sent out via e-mail to his supporters and the Massachusetts legislators.

As I read his vicious rant my heart sank because Claudia's cherished role in the Laramie Project, and her support system of friends, teachers, and counselors had been robbed from her in order to maintain her mother's sick addiction to hate...

This is how Amy Contrada justifies her actions:

http://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen/07d/cac/

(I'm not hyperlinking the fuckers. I'm sorry, I'm just not).

Homosexual activists violate special-needs student, daughter of MassResistance staffer.High school involved. Also Boston Globe reporter.Persuaded vulnerable girl to "come out" as a lesbian on homosexual website -- for their propaganda advantage.This is the kind of thing the homosexual movement does in schools across Massachusetts. It is pure evil.

ACTON, MASSACHUSETTS (NOV. 7, 2007) Homosexual activists - possibly in cooperation with school staff -- have viciously targeted a 17-year-old special-needs student, the daughter of Amy Contrada, a MassResistance staffer. (It's outrageous that a parent is now forced to reveal once-private information in order to stop this assault.)

Claudia Contrada was born in Korea and was adopted by Amy and her husband as an infant. Claudia's special needs include psychological/emotional issues and learning disabilities. Amy and her husband had Claudia enrolled in private parochial schools until her special needs exceeded those schools' abilities to deal with them. Thus, in seventh grade, they had no choice but to enroll Claudia in the Acton-Boxborough public school system.

But Claudia is talented in singing and especially acting. She has a beautiful voice and a fantastic memory for lines and lyrics. She has won awards for her acting. Her therapists said that Claudia's participation in the school's drama program is directly related to treatment of her special needs.Pro-homosexual, violent play

This year the high school decided to have the drama club perform "The Laramie Project", a very objectionable pro-homosexual, anti-Christian play filled with profanity and extreme violence. Last summer, Amy met with school officials and also the drama board and begged them to choose a different play, citing Claudia's vulnerabilities. They responded very coldly, and refused to consider it...

Of course, Claudia is no more a lesbian than the man in the moon. She's always had crushes on boys, and her bedroom has always been (and still is) plastered with pictures of boys.

[picture of her daughter's wall]

Claudia's bedroom wall: Does this look like a lesbian's room to you?

So when Claudia told Amy and her husband that she's a lesbian, they basically ignored it as another silly idea that Claudia got from the latest school lunacy, and nothing more. Claudia doesn't really understand what "lesbian" is. It was all about getting attention. They did worry that she was starting to hang out with some very strange kids who had their own emotional problems stemming from "gay" and "transgender" identity issues...

Got that so far? We've got: outing the kid as a (transracial) adoptee, because it is important for everyone to know what kind, saintly people the parents are for taking the wee waif in (and incidentally, whatever's wrong with her is Not Their Fault). We've got rampant ableism--incidentally, what -are- Claudia's "special needs," exactly? There's nothing in the interview or anywhere else that suggests that she's got anything hampering her ability to get on in the world besides hateful, fucked-up "parents" and other authority figures, who, speaking of evil and religion and so on, sound like poster figures for Scott Peck's "People of the Lie." Whatever it is, though, it clearly means she just doesn't know her own mind; she's -confused-, poor dear. Also, she has pictures of teenage boy pop idols on her wall, which means she's totally straight. There is no contradiction here. Anyway, it's best she get taken out of school and away from the Bad Influences, for her own good,- of course. I'm afraid from there it actually gets worse. Photos of her queer classmates, the "corruptors," with personal information and lurid tales of their supposed depravity...

23 comments:

Note that the reporter says to Claudia, "I don't want to put you in danger" ...with her family! This echoes the message of the "safe space" signs in the school -- that the home is where youth are "in danger."

...which is exactly what we find to be true here in realityland, where we have statistics and everything. Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

At first I struggled with the decision to publish Claudia's brave interview because of her unfortunate situation at home.

Then I thought about what I was doing when I was seventeen. I was completing my senior year of high school at a college in Boston because my rural hometown and high school had become too unsafe due to anti-gay harassment. It was not long before I felt empowered enough to tell my story. Since my arrival in Boston I have met hundreds of teens who, like me, made it through difficult times by their own determination, the support of their friends, and the support of organizations like BAGLY, Boston GLASS, and PFLAG.

Knowing she had the appropriate support networks in place, I decided to post the interview out of respect for Claudia's wishes and for the thousands of queer youth around the world who would draw strength and inspiration from her resilience.

and i mean, yeah, it was dicey; on the other hand, there's nothing to say that Mommy Dearest wouldn't have dragged the kid out of school anyway, once she started self-IDing as a lesbian and hanging around -those people.- on the whole--well, it's hard to know, really, circuses often don't help; but i wonder if maybe it isn't better that people at least know who she is and are trying to keep track of her since she disappeared off the radar. in this instance I think possibly Mom is actually more invasive of her privacy than the general public, maybe.

Not a bad idea; or at least a "get the hell out of Dodge" fund. First let's hope she wasn't shoved off to one of those godawful "reparative therapy" outfits, you know.

She's seventeen; I don't know to what point Mom can do with her what she will in the name of custody, but at least she isn't y'know thirteen. Then, yeah, I'd have been more ambivalent about how wise it was to publish the interview.

Well let's look at this for a minute, her parents obviously adopted her- this CAN (but not necessarily) point to infertility, which for many couples is in and of itself a massive point of anger/frustration in their daily lives.

This anger at one's body's "betrayal" is then a commonly used 'pressure point' used by wingnuts- hell, any repro-related aspects; infertility, abortion, adoption, you name it- all these are fodder for 'em to twist and use.

So then they adopt her- except she's not exactly the little bundle o' joy they *may* have wanted/signed on for, what with so called "emotional problems" and now her lesbianism. So they feel a whole new layer of 'betrayal' and anger. (Which in turn is yet MORE grist for the mill.)

Lots of adoptive couples feel ten kinds of "betrayed" when their adopted kid turns out to be something other than the photocopy of themselves they thought they were getting/buying.

Christians in particular see kids as 'the arrows they fling at the future', the carriers of their own ideology into the future. When a kid rejects that, the anger at said 'child' can be fierce. Add in all Claudia's other 'factors' and it's not surprising to watch these folks loose it, in real time, on the net.

What you have here is textbook adopter's 'buyer's remorse'.

Many christian adopters get kids as part of their own desires for (christian) movement growth, or even take on 'special needs' kids as a form of 'christian witness', i.e. 'see- we even take in the fucked up ones, aren't we wonderful?'

It's sick.

And I have no doubt they are absolutely furious. AND being superstars of the week in wingnutland, considering their 'personal testimony' of how the 'wicked homosexuals engaged in public school recruitment!' (Note, her mother is ON STAFF at Mass Resistance.)

None of which would be possible but for the pre-existing SYSTEM they sit in that tell millions of Americans multiple times a week that the 'homos want your children!' Churches prime the pump, such that when a kid in a family such as this comes out, it's the story millions are pre-set to have receptors for.

Hell, parents like this make CAREERS out of such.

Meanwhile, Claudia herself? I can absolutely sympathize, having been a Queer Bastard myself- fortunately not in a household as fucked up as hers.

Being a transracial adoptee alone is enough to make one feel 'different' or alone, but being Queer, doubly so when everyone at school knows at least one of her parents is a professional homophobe can't be easy. There's the layer of dealing with at home, and then there's the second layer of dealing with it at school.

She never asked for any of this, but these are the people who got their hands on her- and until she turns 18, she's at their mercy- of which they have none.

This is an incredibily vile story. I just put up a small blog about it on my site referring my readers to come over here and am trying to get the word out the the TRA and Korean adoptee communities. Baby Love Child's analysis is pure gold.

you know, I hadn't known much or anything about transracial/national adoptee issues--adoption in general, really, but TR/TN i hadn't considered, till I started reading at Twice the Rice and a few other places.

but I remember thinking: there's a certain parallel to the queer experience, in that the child who belongs to an oppressed group does is doubly alienated because sie does -not- (usually) share this oppression with hir (de facto) parents. in fact the parents themselves may be bigoted...

This kind of thing is so fucking depressing. Control freak abusive bigoted parent who already congratulates herself because she her white magnanimity was enough to adopt this poor child of color . . . grr. :(